Progressive Labor Party on Race & Racism

Progressive Labor Party (PLP) fights to destroy capitalism and the dictatorship of the capitalist class. We organize workers, soldiers and youth into a revolutionary movement for communism.

Only the dictatorship of the working class — communism — can provide a lasting solution to the disaster that is today’s world for billions of people. This cannot be done through electoral politics, but requires a revolutionary movement and a mass Red Army led by PLP.

Worldwide capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit, inevitably leads to war, fascism, poverty, disease, starvation and environmental destruction. The capitalist class, through its state power — governments, armies, police, schools and culture — maintains a dictatorship over the world’s workers. The capitalist dictatorship supports, and is supported by, the anti-working-class ideologies of racism, sexism, nationalism, individualism and religion.

While the bosses and their mouthpieces claim “communism is dead,” capitalism is the real failure for billions worldwide. Capitalism returned to Russia and China because socialism retained many aspects of the profit system, like wages and privileges. Russia and China did not establish communism.

Communism means working collectively to build a worker-run society. We will abolish work for wages, money and profits. Everyone will share in society’s benefits and burdens.

Communism means abolishing racism and the concept of “race.” Capitalism uses racism to super-exploit black, Latino, Asian and indigenous workers, and to divide the entire working class.

Communism means abolishing the special oppression of women — sexism — and divisive gender roles created by the class society.

Communism means abolishing nations and nationalism. One international working class, one world, one Party.

Communism means that the minds of millions of workers must become free from religion’s false promises, unscientific thinking and poisonous ideology. Communism will triumph when the masses of workers can use the science of dialectical materialism to understand, analyze and change the world to meet their needs and aspirations.

Communism means the Party leads every aspect of society. For this to work, millions of workers — eventually everyone — must become communist organizers. Join Us!

This celebratory column is in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution and the world communist movement of the 20th century. We mainly examine its triumps. We welcome your comments and criticisms, and encourage all readers to discuss this period of history with their friends, classmates, co-workers, family, and comrades.

The international working class led by the Soviet Union crushed fascism during World War II, a great achievement. Capitalist rulers lie about it, hiding the key role of the workers and communist leadership in that victory. We reject those lies. Last issue, CHALLENGE busted the following myths:Lie No. 1: British, French and U.S. Capitalists (”Allies”) Always Opposed HitlerLie No. 2: The U.S. And Britain Defeated Hitler, With Little Help from the USSRHere’s the rest.

Lie No. 3: Churchill Was A Great War LeaderChurchill was anti-communist, racist, and a fervent class warrior for British imperialists. In 1910 as Home Minister he sent troops against striking miners and transport workers. He also advised the compulsory sterilization of the “mentally deranged” to “improve British racial stock.”During the Civil War in Russia (1918-21) he organized British intervention against the new workers’ state in a vain attempt to crush it. He advocated the use of poison gas in Iraq against rebelling Arabs, and organized the Black and Tans, which terrorized Catholics in Ireland. During WW II, Churchill delayed the opening of the Second Front in the East against the Nazis. After WW II, he sent British troops to Greece to install a fascist king, after it was liberated from the Nazis by communist-led partisans. Churchill served the British ruling class well, but the masses in Asia and Africa booted out British colonial rule soon after the war.Lie No. 4: Japan Was Defeated By The U.S.The Chinese Red Army destroyed more than a 1.7 million fascist troops and their puppets. This was far more than the number of Japanese soldiers destroyed by the British, U.S. and the Kuomintang (the Chinese nationalists) armies combined. The two major war campaigns against the U.S. involved less than one-fifth of the Japanese forces fighting against the Communists in China. Lie No. 5: Atomic Bombs Were Necessary To End the Japanese War QuicklyStalin, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that the Soviet Red Army, after defeating the Nazis, would attack Japanese forces in China, supposedly to avoid the high casualties that would result from an invasion of Japan. But the U.S. had already tested the A-Bomb and dropped it on August 6, two days before the planned Soviet attack. The U.S. was thus able to claim credit for the Japanese surrender and gain full control of Japan after the war. The A-bombs were used to warn the Soviet Union and workers of the world struggling for revolution, that a capitalist power possessed a super-weapon and would use it to maintain dominance. Even capitalist scholars now admit that the U.S. lied about the Bomb saving 500,000-700,000 American lives that Truman said would have been lost in a full-scale invasion (the Japanese government had sent surrender proposals for months). Lie No. 6: Hitler Was the Cause of WW II and the HolocaustThe root cause of war is the continuous need of the ruling class to amass capital and to exploit workers and natural resources. The European capitalist classes fought colonial wars for control of labor and resources. The U.S. invaded Panama to secure the Canal and launched the Gulf War to control Middle East oil.The holocaust is often blamed on “Nazi mentality”. Nazi mentality is really capitalist mentality in its most vicious form. Capitalism thrives on racism. Although the murder of tens of millions within a few years is unprecedented in human history, there are many other examples of racist mass murder, including the slave trade from Africa and the slaughter of native peoples in the Americas. Lie No. 7: The Nazi Party, Not the Capitalist Class, Turned Germany FascistThe German capitalist class forced fascism on Germany. This class of bankers and businessmen funded Hitler. It gave him money to organize the storm-troopers who terrorized the working class. Hitler banned strikes and put communists and labor activists into concentration camps. Between 1934 and 1938, while actual wages dropped, capitalists’ profits soared by 50 percent. German capitalists made huge profits from the war from slave labor.Lie No. 8: The Soviet Forces Were Anti-Semitic.A big lie is that Soviet forces were anti-Semitic. In fact, one of the first orders Stalin gave to the Red Army was to evacuate Jewish families to the East into the safety of the Soviet rear, out of the reach of the advancing Nazi army. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish workers fought in the Red Army and as partisans in the Soviet Union and Europe. In late 1941, special agents were sent from Moscow to fight any anti-Semitism. In contrast, in the anti-communist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where the average jail sentence for war crimes was ten minutes per murdered victim, most of the Nazi killers retained their jobs. Lie No. 9: Liberal Democracy Is the Opposite of FascismEvery capitalist state, liberal or fascist, is a dictatorship over the working class to create and sustain conditions for the exploitation of workers. Any worker on strike readily gets first-hand experience of this reality. When the economy is up and workers’ opposition is not militant, the capitalist state can allow some free speech. But when crises happen, the capitalist state reveals its true nature. Fascism is the logical form of capitalist state power.As the Great Depression of the 1930s gripped the world, fascism spread worldwide. The Soviet Union, then communist-led and a source of inspiration to world’s workers, was its main target. Communism, not liberal democracy, is the opposite of fascism. Lie No. 10: The Jewish People Let themselves Be Slaughtered by the NazisThe murder of millions of Jewish, Roma and other people who were considered “unter-menschen” (German for “subhumans”) by the Nazis is one of the most barbaric acts in modern history. Even though they accept the existence of the holocaust, the bosses’ media has spread a number of lies.Films like “Schindler’s List” imply that Jewish people went like lambs to the slaughter. In reality, there was widespread resistance to the Nazis in the ghettos and camps. Early in 1943, 50,000 Jewish people in the Warsaw Ghetto, organized by the Polish Communist Party and other anti-Nazi groups, fought for weeks against an SS division.Fires of revolt blazed even inside Nazi death factories. Auschwitz inmates blew up a crematorium with the help of smuggled dynamite. At Sobibor, a daring revolt organized with the leadership of a Red Army officer killed 50 SS guards with 300 prisoners escaping to freedom. Communists in the ghettoes fought against sellout “leaders” who served the Nazis by carrying out their orders and telling people not to fight back.Why does capitalist culture lie about these events? One of its important roles is to spread passivity in the face of oppression. Also, it is a fact that most of the Jewish fight-back against the Nazis was led by communists, and was anti-racist at heart. So the racist, anti-communist capitalists hide the truth of Jewish resistance. While victory over fascism is part of the legacy of the world’s working class, we mustn’t overlook the mistakes of its communist leadership. In the Soviet Union, concessions were made to nationalism. Military ranks were introduced in 1937, counter to the proletarian spirit. Communists developed coalitions with “anti-fascist” capitalists (e.g. Britain and the U.S.) under the guise of fighting fascism. These mistakes helped maintain capitalism in Western Europe, and restore full-blown capitalism to the U.S.S.R. after Stalin’s death. Today, with deepening crises and imperialist rivalry, the fascist clouds are gathering fast. It is essential for Progressive Labor Party to lead the working class in another struggle against capitalism, and its monsters of fascism and war. The struggle is more difficult because there is now no center of working class power like the U.S.S.R. was then. But if we learn from history, we will not go half-way; we will fight for communism and true emancipation for the working class.